The new book by Adrian McPhee
New Operating Logic for the AI Era
AI makes output abundant. Alignment keeps outcomes scarce. Companies with a lower internal cost of change convert more AI capacity into completed outcomes. The rest turn it into longer queues.
For executives, operators, product leaders, engineers and boards.
If your company uses the business to mean a group of people that does not include engineers, and the company depends on software to sell, serve customers, manage risk or run operations, it is a software-dependent corporate. Its organisation chart says technology is a support function. Its operating reality says otherwise.
These companies fragmented authority over outcomes, then built an alignment economy to stitch it back together. Meetings multiply. Translation roles appear between people who should share one context. Ordinary change needs a coalition because no one owns the complete path from decision to production evidence.
AI magnifies the consequence. The organisation is already a distributed system. Its design determines whether AI leverage produces better outcomes or longer queues.
What companies call alignment is often the operating cost of fragmented authority. At organisational scale, alignment is coupling.
Process-owning units built around the smallest end-to-end path that can produce and learn from an outcome, with the authority required to change it.
Published contracts at real seams, central constraints instead of per-change permission, and a first-unit test with costs, stop rules and falsification conditions declared in advance.
What companies call alignment is the operating cost of fragmented authority: coupling by another name.
The End of Alignment develops the diagnosis, derives an alternative around complete processes, and makes the proposal testable. It shows what the change costs, what would falsify it, what machines now read and who loses.
Read the public sample and full contents, or buy the complete ebook.
Buy The End of AlignmentAdrian McPhee is an entrepreneur, engineer and technology leader. For more than 25 years, he has built software, designed and implemented operating models in multi-billion-dollar companies, and helped create successful startups. He has used AI daily in engineering since 2023.
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